Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old?

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨1SimpleTailor@startrek.website⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

I’m genuinely curious. Years ago, I was a chubby young pothead who lived on fast food. Taco Bell, McDonald’s, KFC, you name it—I ate it. Back in college, fast food probably made up at least 50% of my diet. And it wasn’t just because it was quick and cheap—I actually enjoyed it.

But these days, I find myself craving it less and less. Besides being more health-conscious, it just doesn’t hit the spot like it used to. It’s more expensive than ever, mostly bland, and I feel terrible after I eat it. So what’s changed? Is it just part of the enshitification of everything? Have I just gotten old, or has fast food really gone downhill?

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slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Both?

Yes it has gotten worse and time is a relentless asshole.

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- Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  RIP Trans fats. So delicious, so terrible for you.
  
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  - Krauerking@lemy.lol ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Can we all just collectively accept death is an inevitability and eat tasty food? This need for perfection in everything we touch is killing me.
    
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simple@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Brand names have gotten worse, that’s not you. Cost saving measures upon making sizes smaller while still raising prices. I swear, KFC mid-2000’s was amazing compared to the bland oily ones of today.

Local fast food is still really good for me, but I’d just avoid major brands like Mcdonalds. They’ve become synonymous with trash food.

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- nickhammes@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren’t essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it’s only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don’t want to pay as much staff during peak hours.
  
  Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.
  
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  - mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    only 12%
    
    hurk…
    
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- MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’m in the UK and KFC has gone downhill here too - something I’m very grateful for! A few years ago I got a real craving for a crispy, juicy piece of chicken with the colonel’s secret spices. I ended up with a grim, wizened leg that tasted of stale oil and despair. Never again. My own cooking is sooo much better, and cheaper too. Win win!
  
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TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The feeling bad part is aging.

Quality has absolutely gone down, though, while cost has gone way up.

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- KillingAndKindess@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’m feeling nitpicky in general so I apologize in advance.
  
  Prices have gone up, not costs. The increase in overhead for these places hasn’t gone towards maintaining the same product quality, much less improving it, nor has it gone towards the pay of workers, and its not really even the real estate.
  
  The bigger price listed is almost entirely because shareholders want more before they keel over finally fucking die
  
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  - TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That’s fair. I meant cost as in cost to me, the consumer, which is the price, but I think what you’ve said here is a valuable thing to consider when wondering why it’s so expensive and yet shit now.
    
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- beansbeansbeans@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Eating garbage food will also make you feel bad, no matter your age.
  
  I used to eat junk food a lot in undergrad, and since I developed a tolerance/got used to feeling shitty I didn’t realize how much it impacted me day-to-day. Once I started grad school I shifted to healthier eating (real, unprocessed food), and quickly noticed how much better I felt, how much more energy I had. Now if I eat fast food (rarely) I always feed like crap right after the meal.
  
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Kolrami@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The answer is probably "yes"

Food is probably worse.

Your taste buds might have changed.

Your gut bacteria might be different.

I have a couple reasons for believing each.

Nutrient concentration in food has decreased over time (Veritasium talked about a fascinating explanation for this.) and the desire to find low cost alternatives like HFCS over cane sugar changes the taste of food.

"Children prefer higher levels of sweet and are more sensitive to bitter tastes until adolescence."

Your gut microbiome literally changes over time.changing/)
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tunetardis@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The other day I ordered a burger and they put tomatoes on it even though I asked them not to. I was about to complain, but decided to take a bite anyway and…huh. The tomato had no flavour whatsoever. I used to not like the taste of tomatoes but how could I object to this?

So what does this mean? Are my taste buds not functioning like they used to? But I spent lunch looking it up and apparently, there is a fair consensus that tomatoes, along with a host of other fruits and vegetables, really are blander today than when I was a kid. For something I never liked, this kind of works out but…

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- spittingimage@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  My wife, a keen gardener of heirloom tomatoes, says it’s because the varieties that sell commercially are bred for long shelf-life and nothing else.
  
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  - Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    My grandmother died last year at the age of 103. I’m 41. I can remember being a kid, before she became too old to maintain the house she raised 4 kids in. It was a BIG house. It had a HUGE backyard, that as a kid I didn’t have any appriciation for how massive that place was. Now, today, I remember the 80s, and think “wait…was my grandpa rich before he died?” I was 5 when he died, but he picked out the house in the 1960s, that she then lived alone in after he died. All her children were adults with their own children by then.
    
    The end result is, she said to my grandpa “I don’t care what you do inside the house. I don’t care how you decorate. I don’t care what furniture you buy. I just want a comfortable bed, and that backyard is MINE.” My grandpa, who HATED maintaining the outdoors, readily agreed to this. It meant she would do the yardwork that men of the time were mostly expected to do. While he got the house to himself (mostly). She used the backyard to grow a garden. A big garden. Lived in the city, but you’d swear this was a farmland with no animals.
    
    Everytime I’d go over to her house as a kid, I’d run to the garden and pick off beans. These long pod style green beans. And these other green beans which were more narrow.
    
    I’d eat them right where they were growing. And every time my dad would be like “HEY!!! THAT’S NOT YOUR GARDEN!!! YOU CAN’T JUST EAT THINGS FROM THE GARDEN!!! I’M YOUR DAD!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”
    
    And every time, my Grandma, who was not a yeller, and not an angry person would yell back at my dad “HEY! THAT IS MY GARDEN!!! AND I SAY HE CAN EAT AS MUCH HEALTHY FRUITS AND VEGITABLES AS HE WANTS!!! I’M YOUR MOM!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”
    
    It was more in a mocking him sense, for being so angry over something so stupid. Oh no, a growing boy wants to eat healthy vegitables! What a tragedy! His logic being that I have to ask permission before eating other peoples food. Which in most contexts makes sense.
    
    Until you realize, my grandma was like 120lbs, and she was growing like 60lbs of food in her garden. She wasn’t shy of saying that every neighborhood kid (which was a lot of kids) and all her grandkids, and her own adult kids were free to eat as much as they wanted, take as much as they wanted home. She enjoyed growing the food, but harvesting it was a chore. Plus, it was meant for all of us anyways, so if we grabed it straight from the vine, that was just free harvesting labor that she didn’t have to do, with the food going to the same place anyways.
    
    When you ate food off her vine, you knew you were at grams house. Most people miss their childhood because they miss a tv show, or a friend group they had, or the freedom of not having bills and responsibility. I miss that garden, and helping my grandma harvest. I was 5 years old, running around, picking beans, and listening to grandma tell her stories of how she met my grandpa, and what life in the 60s was like. Which for the time would be like me today explaining what 2004 was like. The 60s seems like such a culturally distant time ago, but at the time she was talking about this, it was just 20 years prior. I’m getting nostolgic for the 80s, and the 60s, a decade I wasn’t even alive for, because I can vividly remember her telling me what life was like during the civil rights movements of the late 60s. She talked about what my dad was like when he was a kid. She wasn’t afraid to take the piss out of my dad by embarassing him to his son. All while we picked beans, and strawberries, and berries, and her favorite tomatoes.
    
    She LOVED tomatoes. Loved loved loved them. She used to say “I know everyones welcome to my garden, but I might have to start growing more tomatoes, or placing restrictions on them. I don’t know WHAT I’d do if everybody wanted my tomatoes! I can’t get enough of them!”
    
    Which was her polite way of basically doing the whole garden of eden thing, except instead of an apple, she was saying “don’t fucking touch my tomatoes!!!” Which nobody did. Also, nobody was naked.
    
    Then in the mid 90s, she eventually had to admit she could no longer upkeep a 6 bedroom house, and a yard that was meant for kids to play in, when she had no kids. By then I was a teenager, and while I could have played in the sense of sports, my days of egg hunting on easter, and running around in capes, and jumping on trees was behind me. My aunt always said "You know, she held off on selling that house, so you could grow up first. It wouldn’t be fair that all her grandkids EXCEPT you got to enjoy the garden, and that yard (I’m the youngest). Then as time went on, eventually she began complaining about tomatoes around the year 2010. She’d say “Is it too late to go get my garden back? These things are tasteless, and not at all juicy. What am I supposed to do with a dry flavorless red bulb? Can it even be called a tomato??? I’m just going to call it worthless.”
    
    I guess I took a while to get to the point of the point of the tomato in this story, but I’m never going to appologize for rambling on and on about my hero in life. I’ll ramble on and on about her to people who never met her, when I’M 90 years old. I’ll seem crazy, and it’ll just seem like old man rambling crazy talk about tomatoes, and pickling jars, and tree forts, and easter egg hunts with 1000 easter eggs for a group of 20 kids.
    
    I’ll seem crazy, but oh well. That’s fine. I miss her, and I miss that time. That’s the biggest part I miss about my childhood. Seeing her happy with a tomato in her hand, and a big straw hat on sunny days, yelling at my dad to calm the fuck down. Nicest woman in the world. Loved you with all her heart. She’d help you with her last dollar if you were in need. But she wouldn’t take shit. When my dad tried to bully control of the conversation, she took him down a peg everytime. And because everyone, him included, respected her, she could do it at any time. The strongest person in the room doesn’t need to yell. They can control an entire room with a whisper. Make you shut up, just so you can hear them by quieting the room, and making you follow their lead. Yelling just proves you have no control of any situation. Gram taught me that everytime my dad would yell, and she would calm him down to a whisper without so much as raising her tone. THAT’S what being a strong person is. Being kind by nature, but tough by force.
    
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  - tunetardis@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Ah that would certainly explain it.
    
    My working theory had been that maybe they were being selected for size à la strawberries, which have grown almost comically huge in recent years. But it’s as though nature can only provide a set amount of flavour per fruit, and by growing it larger, it only gets diluted over a greater volume? But I haven’t been able to determine whether fast food tomatoes are behemoths since they are already cut up.
    
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  - captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Long shelf life and/or physical durability. Alton Brown made this point in an episode of Good Eats by clamping a supermarket tomato in a bench vise.
    
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- Fosheze@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Hydroponic tomatos are cheap, big, and never have any flavor. Those are what most fastfood uses.
  
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- aStonedSanta@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Denying the plant to have genetic variance causes issues you say!?!?
  
  😆
  
  Look into bananas if you wanna know why banana flavoring doesn’t taste like our current bananas
  
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- Psythik@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The fact that you don’t like tomatoes in of itself is proof that the problem is with your taste buds. Tomatoes are high glutamic acid (umami), and I’ve never heard of a person who didn’t like savory foods.
  
  There’s a reason why MSG is making a comeback: because it tastes good (and because people are finally starting to figure out that its stigma is deeply-rooted in racism. It’s better for you than salt).
  
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  - Baguette@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Just because people don’t like a certain food doesnt mean their taste buds have a problem. Liking food is all subjective, that’s what it means to be human
    
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  - tunetardis@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh man, you sound like my mother! She was actually Japanese and grew her own tomatoes. She was always forcing them on me, saying Ne, umai-deshou! (See? They’re full of umami!)
    
    I actually like cooked tomatoes in all forms, but there is something in the flavour profile of a raw tomato that turns me off.
    
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RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think it was always shit, you and your taste buds just grew up.

At the time I ate lots of fast-food I also liked to drink lots of soda and ice tea, like 2 liters in one sitting when hung over. Now I puke a little in my mouth just thinking of that garbage.

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AuthenticAccount@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
As far as I can tell, Wendy’s took a dive after the founder passed away, and Pizza Hut took a dive at least 20 years ago.

The rest it seems dependent on location. I often wonder how much of the variable issues of quality I see are result of continued pressure on the workers as capitalism continues to grind them down.

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RagingRobot@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It doesn’t pay a living wage so the people working there don’t give a shit about anything

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GuyFi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I work at McDonald’s, it is not good and is best avoided.

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Subverb@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m 60 now and am literally a Boomer; fast food has definitely gotten worse. Especially in the last 10 years or so. The foods and processes have been tweaked and tuned to the point that the value of the food hovers just barely above the price and not a tick more.

Health concerns also play a role. McDonald’s fries are a good example. When I was young they were cooked in beef tallow and they were so good they would roll your eyes back in your head in in ecstacy (not kidding). They switched to vegetable oil due to health concerns over saturated fats and they’ve just never been the same.

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whotookkarl@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Not just fast food, chains and franchises in general. Local only may be more of a quality gamble when trying things out but when you find that unassuming diner or small restaurant that takes pride in their daily soups, and doesn’t do delivery or apps, and closes at reasonable times for their workers, and is usually packed on weekends, you’ve found something special.

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Sgt_choke_n_stroke@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s gotten worse. I don’t bother eating any of it because I make better food at home.

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SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I worked in a “European” US bakery for a hot minute around 2012, and one of the things I remember most was them trying to find new providers with cheaper products. This lead to a difference in taste because obviously in this case the cheaper products are actually a sub-par product.

A big part of it has been the consolidation of the businesses who sell food to restaurants. They all pull from the same places, and so the variety has gone down and the filler gone up.

It’s not just fast food, it’s all restaurants that are suffering this plague.

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- 5oap10116@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  My home-made pizza tops any delivery, and I always get to eat it hot out of the oven.
  
  What state/country do you live in?
  
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intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m in my 40s, and I’ve found that fast food quality varies up and down from year to year and location to location.

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acchariya@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yes, and you can thank private equity for it.

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scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
We sense less and less as we get older. I’ve learned this from observing my kids and seeing them react to things like needles and spicy food with such greater sensitivity than me. I can remember being like them, too. But I just plow through experiences now with less sensation of them. Part of it is that my senses are slightly more dull, but also important: my cognitive filters are much more established and sensations that are outside of them get little notice. Meanwhile my kids are like raw nerves at the mercy of every experience that comes their way. Bubble gum probably doesn’t blow your hair back anymore either but I bet it was awesome when you were a kid.

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- SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  We do enjoy stronger tastes as we get older.
  
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- Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s not just cognitive. We lose taste buds with age, and the ones that remain shrink and lose sensitivity.
  
  It makes sense if you think about it. Bitterness is associated with a lot of poisons. Sourness is associated with spoiled foods. Having a strong aversion to these tastes during childhood compelled our ancestors to avoid dangerous foods during their most fragile stages of life.
  
  Then of course, sugar is a quick source of energy. It should be a given why a quick source of energy benefitted our ancient ancestors (for whom food was much more scarce.)
  
  In short, that increased childhood sensitivity allowed our ancestors to survive until adulthood.
  
  So parents - next time a kid complains about their dinner being too bitter, take comfort in knowing that if they were ever exposed to actual poison, they’d avoid it with the same urgency.
  
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HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It has gone to shit.

In some cases like McDonald’s, the ingredients have been on par while the cooking quality has tanked.

For a lot of other places, both the cooking and ingredient quality tanked.

Taco Bell is probably one of the few major chains I still eat at because their ingredients are hard to fuck up cooking and putting it together isn’t that difficult.

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Lemisset@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think enshittification is hitting everything, but it’s probably also that you are old. I find that I just can’t eat the same way that I could 20 years ago.

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oyo@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Mmmm, tastes like supply chain optimization.

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UncleBadTouch@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
im in my 40s and feel the same as you. things like fast food dont hold the same appeal, just nostalgia wishing for the ‘old taste’

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General_Shenanigans@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s gotten worse, however, I think the perception is compounded by how expensive it is now and also just eating better as I get older. Now that I know how to cook real, delicious food, fast food just seems so much grosser than it used to. It’s a little worse compared to 10 years ago, but much worse compared to the 80’s and early 90’s, depending on the chain. For example, Taco Bell was a LOT better back in the 80’s. You were more likely spend a bunch of time on the toilet later, but hey, give a little take a little.

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Carnelian@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Genuinely shocking to me how disgusting fast food places have gotten. But I’m also not sure if it’s just my perception

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- shani66@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It super isn’t. Pizza is still alright in my experience, but everywhere that has fried chicken tastes significantly worse than it used to.
  
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  - QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The big chains got worse since there is basically a cheese monopoly in the US and its products have gotten cheaper to produce and worse quality. The expensive pizza places are still great because they typically don’t source their cheese from them. Can’t remember where I read that.
    
    Ex. Pizza Hit in the 80s was incredible pizza. It’s meh now.
    
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jaybone@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Is it just part of the enshitification of everything?

Yes

Have I just gotten old

Get off my lawn.

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Notyou@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
KFC has gotten shittier chicken. I don’t even eat there anymore. I would rather get a rotisserie from a food library.

Wendy’s has gotten worse with their ‘sauced nuggets’. I’m 100% convinced the quality of meat in their chicken nuggets got worse and the new CEO is trying to cover it up by adding sauces as a gimmick.

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CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
27 years old here, its gone to complete shit. Last mcdonalds I tried was just weirdly uniform mush with barely any discernable flavour.

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Glent@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Like everything else they are dropping quality and portion sizes while increasing prices. Line must go up. Last time I bought a quarter pounder at mcdonalds it was definitely made from 70% mongolian horse lung. Yea, I remember when it used to be a tasty burger. Fucking weird that their “beef” has become gamey.

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TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Depends on the company and where you live, I feel. Some has gotten worse, some has improved.

But they have all gotten more expensive. So goddamn expensive. These days I can order a well made, flame-grilled burger at a burger joint for the same price as fast food slop.

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- wjrii@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The only thing I’ll say there is that with burgers you can sometimes get out over your skis and take a tumble. A lot of sit-down places think some giant watery meatball is a good burger. While photogenic, it is not necessarily good, and a short-order smashed patty or (smashed patties) generally taste a lot better and are easier to eat.
  
  The best burgers are almost certainly not fast food burgers, but the worst burgers aren’t either.
  
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- nobody158@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  And about the same speed. Most places take call in orders too now so call ahead and it’s basically ready when you get there
  
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gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
29 and it’s worse now

I used to actively enjoy Carl’s Jr, they made good burgers, especially for a fast food place

Starting 2022ish they started all tasting… Bland? Like no matter what’s put on it there’s a never-ending bland flavorless ness underneath it all and it sucks

Basically everywhere else too but that’s the one I noticed

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Kaiyoto@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Taco bell has turned to ass. Even their bean burrito tasted off and most of the menu items I see are crazy shit that doesn’t resemble anything in terms of Mexican food.

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- QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s always been trash …
  
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SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Maybe folks have just grown out of most fast food. It is generally too greasy for my stomach now.

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